A few more acquisitions to get back into retro PCs:

- Gigabyte GA-BX2000 + Pentium II 400MHz + 384MB SDR + GF2 MX ASUS
- 3D Prophet 4000XT 32MB AGP
- combo pack - ASUS K7M, ASUS P4PE, Athlon XP-M 2600+ and a Thunderbird 1400

A few more deals await:
- entire baby AT machine w/ Jamicon board, Super 7 w/ Ali Aladdin 5 chipset and a K6-II I believe
- Voodoo 3 3000 AGP

Purchased this a couple of weeks back, need to tear it down and clean it all up. I was particularly keen on this machine (Tiny is a now defunct UK brand) because it had an AMD setup within. Specs are 1GHz Slot A, 256MB memory, TNT2 M64 with the most tiny heatsink and fan ever and network / firewire cards. Originally had Millennium on there but I've never come across a Tiny restore setup for ME.

RetroAddict wrote on 2026-09-10, 00:15:

Purchased this a couple of weeks back, need to tear it down and clean it all up. I was particularly keen on this machine (Tiny is a now defunct UK brand) because it had an AMD setup within. Specs are 1GHz Slot A, 256MB memory, TNT2 M64 with the most tiny heatsink and fan ever and network / firewire cards. Originally had Millennium on there but I've never come across a Tiny restore setup for ME.

Wonder if it's this board:
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/msi-ms-6316-ir3

Interestingly it's listed as IR3... except IR3's real retail number is supposed to be MS-6195 (aka K7Pro).

Shader_BiH wrote on 2026-09-09, 13:19:

Meanwhile... I managed to get two more video cards...

Always loved the design of this card. Super aesthetic.

Wow, 1 GHz slot A, those are rare and expensive... Nice find. Weird paring with TNT2 M64, try to find a Geforce DDR or a Geforce2 Ultra.

RaverX wrote on 2026-09-10, 11:52:

Wow, 1 GHz slot A, those are rare and expensive... Nice find. Weird paring with TNT2 M64, try to find a Geforce DDR or a Geforce2 Ultra.

Tiny were a high street brand here in the U.K. many had machines from these guys but they weren’t known for top components with other appropriate components! I have a GeForce 2 ultra in my card drawer, will definitely give that a go! It needs a clean and the case needs a bath first though 👍

RaverX wrote on 2026-09-10, 11:52:

Wow, 1 GHz slot A, those are rare and expensive... Nice find. Weird paring with TNT2 M64, try to find a Geforce DDR or a Geforce2 Ultra.

If it's a MS-6316 inside, that M64 is soldered onboard with no AGP in sight. Basically a copy of the 6191 but with onboard GPU.

Package came in.

-P4PE - works
- IC7-G - needs a BIOS reflash
- K7M - powers on, cannot test further for now.
- AXP-M 2600+ - dead (cracked die)
- Thunderbird 1400 - 50/50 chances it works - there's a bit of chipping on the core but I've had similar chips work fine in similar states (1GHz though).

For the K7M I have an 800MHz Pluto/Orion on the way.

Just got bought a Compaq LTE Elite 75/CX, Here it's next to my 50E. The screen of the monochrome 50E is so much nicer than the color screen of the 75CX

Beautiful laptops, the screen color is nice and warm.

steberg wrote on 2026-09-11, 15:43:

Just got bought a Compaq LTE Elite 75/CX, Here it's next to my 50E. The screen of the monochrome 50E is so much nicer than the color screen of the 75CX

I'm starting to think Apple copied them, looks like a retro iBook. And I bet it doesn't smell like a nasty gym locker.

steberg wrote on 2026-09-11, 15:43:

Just got bought a Compaq LTE Elite 75/CX, Here it's next to my 50E. The screen of the monochrome 50E is so much nicer than the color screen of the 75CX

These are GORGEOUS.

RetroAddict wrote on 2026-09-10, 15:28:

RaverX wrote on 2026-09-10, 11:52:

Wow, 1 GHz slot A, those are rare and expensive... Nice find. Weird paring with TNT2 M64, try to find a Geforce DDR or a Geforce2 Ultra.

Tiny were a high street brand here in the U.K. many had machines from these guys but they weren’t known for top components with other appropriate components! I have a GeForce 2 ultra in my card drawer, will definitely give that a go! It needs a clean and the case needs a bath first though 👍

There was an independent repair shop (where I worked) and they displayed TINY cases in the shop window, boasted "we repair TINY computers" if anyone asked, and the recollection shows how respected familiar the TINY brand was at the time.

The actual TINY store (on the same road) operated like a Vodafone store does today - they hired salesmen who didn't know much about how computers worked, couldn't speak to components that were not in their official catalogue, and I remember them describing some kind of frog software demo as a feature?

Advert to make you cringe:
https://archive.org/details/TinyComputersAdvert

TINY restore pack that references 3.1, 95, 98, NT4 - not ME/2000 🙁
https://ia902806.us.archive.org/view_archive. … RESTORE58UK.iso

PcBytes wrote on 2026-09-11, 14:40:

Package came in. […]
Show full quote

Package came in.

-P4PE - works
- IC7-G - needs a BIOS reflash
- K7M - powers on, cannot test further for now.
- AXP-M 2600+ - dead (cracked die)
- Thunderbird 1400 - 50/50 chances it works - there's a bit of chipping on the core but I've had similar chips work fine in similar states (1GHz though).

For the K7M I have an 800MHz Pluto/Orion on the way.

Slight update - IC7-G has some sort of fault where be it with or without a card in, it stops at 24/25 POST codes, and as such has been deemed non-functional. The rest most likely work fine (specifically - P4PE, K7M and the Thunderbird 1400.)

Finally bought a Diamond S220, off a seller that gave me a huge discount on it and seemingly was desperate to get it sold because they dropped the price from $55 to $45 then $40, and since nobody went and bought it overnight I decided to go for it, so ended up getting it for $25 plus $13 shipping. I'll get some photos of it once it's here and I've tested it out.

I have been a bit flaky the last couple of weeks, trying to get at least a couple of ducks in line before I was incapacitated. Been trying to get my sinuses and throat rebored for a while, and it came together at last. ENT says it was wayyy worse than he expected. Lots of infection pockets, with an implied "OMG I can't believe you were walking around like this" which is about my 5th or 6th. I gotta practice how to look sick or something, guess everyone thinks I look as strong as an Ox, so can't get medical complaints taken seriously until we get to the "OMG, I can't believe how bad this is.". But that's just to lead up to saying I'm on ALL the drugs right now, so obviously an ideal time to buy hardware.

So, incoming is a i7-4770k, i7-2600, E8400 and E5500, which was $50, so seemed worth it for the first two. E8400 is probably going to find a seat too. E5500 might be spare a while unless it turns out easy to get it into a lower FSB, older Conroe system or something. Or turn it up to 6ghz for dull orange mood lighting or something.

Also finally found a cheap fully inline PATA<>SATA adapter, I keep coming across right angle ones or weirdly offset. So this one seems it has a fighting chance of getting a SATA where a PATA had a tight fit.

Other stuff to mess with is USB to laptop mini SATA. Which I hope is handy for testing laptop opticals, and might get semi perm deployment as interface for a BlueRay drive that turned up in a dead machine.

Seeing a local dude offering a box of motherboards "for scrap" though he needs a few ppl telling him his price is crackpipe before I'll give it a try. Like dude scrap PCB is like $2.50 a lb, get real. Probably not getting out of the house much until next week though. Right now his average price per board is riding about at the price for a complete, not kicked around, recent board with specified known fault.... without even 10% off for bulk.

Anyway hope I can concentrate for a while soon, taking "time out" and not being about to play with toys would suck. ATM feels like I've got a few golfballs stuck in my throat and been kicked in the face by a horse. Though I have heard of these procedures causing "unbelievable" pain, but seems fairly believable at the moment, as in, I have had sore throats and sinus infections that got close, think Omicron covid was this bad, plus pounding inside head and runny guts.

Two new arrivals this weekend:

I know some of you are thinking "wait, that's not retro!" But I feel like socket 775 generation systems are currently at the border of what's now considered "retro." So, I'll be using this in a tri-SLI system I'm building on a nForce 780i motherboard. Just need to pick up two more of these once I find a good deal, and the EVGA cards seem to be the most common for 9800 GTX+ cards.

I'm going to shuck this behemoth and use the internal IDE drive in a Win98 system, to come in just under the 132 GB limit. Imagine how many Win9x games I can fit on that bad boy!

I'll cross my fingers for you, that might be the Diamondmax with large cache, forgot whether it was 8 or 16MB, better than the 2MB though. They were getting up there in bandwidth so make sure you got a good 80 conductor cable.

Good luck with the 9800s, I had 3 9600s collect up here, so I think about 3 way SLI on and off.

BitWrangler wrote on 57 minutes ago:

I'll cross my fingers for you, that might be the Diamondmax with large cache, forgot whether it was 8 or 16MB, better than the 2MB though. They were getting up there in bandwidth so make sure you got a good 80 conductor cable.

Good luck with the 9800s, I had 3 9600s collect up here, so I think about 3 way SLI on and off.

I already do have another tri-SLI system on a Sandy Bridge 2500k system, it's running 3 GTX 580s, ASUS Maximus V Extreme motherboard. The third card does not scale well at all, the performance gain is minimal and definitely not worth the cost of a whole third card, but I got all 3 for less than $100, and it is cool as hell, something most of us could only dream of back then. 😅